We need vertex animation enclosed in "vertex actions", so we can mix and match them with bone animations. Right now, RVK animations are linked to the project timeline itself, and this way we cannot have say a facial animation be diferent in two or more actions. The only way to get it right now, as far as I can find, is by creating an entire new scene (multiplying all the Objects in the file for every scene), or making diferent proyects. Not very usefull.

This is also the case with constraints, also linked to the main timeline in a way that makes more difficult to use them diferently in every action.

And talking about RVKs, it would be also a great character animation adition to have a way to link some vertex animation to the transformations of a bone, like in Animation:Master "Smartskins": you select a bone, say the forearm, and open a new action window where you can rotate this bone and then retouch the deformation by moving and arranging vertexes of the mesh. You do it at every angle you need to controll the bending, and then close the smartskin window. The info of this linked transformations (IPOS) remains stored in the model and, from there, anytime you rotate this bone in a bone-action the mesh reacts as you designed in the SmSk.

I know you can bulge a muscle right now in blender using an auxiliar bone, but this kind of tools offers much more controll and efectivity.

GusM wrote:We need vertex animation enclosed in "vertex actions", so we can mix and match them with bone animations. Right now, RVK animations are linked to the project timeline itself, and this way we cannot have say a facial animation be diferent in two or more actions. The only way to get it right now, as far as I can find, is by creating an entire new scene (multiplying all the Objects in the file for every scene), or making diferent proyects. Not very usefull.

This is also the case with constraints, also linked to the main timeline in a way that makes more difficult to use them diferently in every action.

And talking about RVKs, it would be also a great character animation adition to have a way to link some vertex animation to the transformations of a bone, like in Animation:Master "Smartskins": you select a bone, say the forearm, and open a new action window where you can rotate this bone and then retouch the deformation by moving and arranging vertexes of the mesh. You do it at every angle you need to controll the bending, and then close the smartskin window. The info of this linked transformations (IPOS) remains stored in the model and, from there, anytime you rotate this bone in a bone-action the mesh reacts as you designed in the SmSk.

I know you can bulge a muscle right now in blender using an auxiliar bone, but this kind of tools offers much more controll and efectivity.

Maybe now that programers are more focused on the animation capabilities of Blender, we can get it working... as far as I can say, Blender has all what is needed: RVK, bones and actions. We just need a tool to manage their relations.

A great aproach would be to implement a more general purpose "Set driven key" tool, which could be used to relate any two parameters in an action, so you can control those relations by keyframing his values. If we can get this working at the actions level, then we could blend between several of them with NLA.

At the end, every kind of animatable channel (material, particles, everything) should be able to be keyframed into an action, and then mixed with other actions at the NLA global timeline.